The Same Company that Built Guantanamo Bay Is Building Kansas City’s World Cup Jail
With an anticipated 650,000 tourists visiting Kansas City, Missouri this summer for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the city rushed to construct a municipal jail in seven months. The jail is scheduled to open on June 1 of this year and, according to the Kansas City Defender, the contractor chosen to construct it has ties to Guantanamo Bay’s detention camp, where detainees have been tortured for decades.
The company, the Louisiana-based firm Brown and Root Industrial Services, is co-owned by KBR, a military contractor that built a detention camp in the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay. Given the firm’s background and the ongoing mass deportation efforts and rapid expansion of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers, a coalition of organizations is leading a campaign to stop the jail from opening.
One of the coalition’s main concerns is that the jail—whose cost has ballooned from nearly $4 million to a projected $25 million—will be a permanent rather than temporary fixture in Kansas City. As Derek Buford, an organizer with Decarcerate KC, the group leading the campaign, told The Kansas City Defender, “FIFA will leave and the jail stays in our community. In the shadows of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the city of Kansas City is building a detention center that will lock up community members long after the games are over. That’s not a World Cup investment for our City; that’s a permanent expansion of incarceration disguised as event planning.”
Source: The Kansas City Defender
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